


La chasse à la renarde (The Fox-Hunt)

by breathedout



Category: Orlando - Virginia Woolf
Genre: European history, F/F, F/M, Fun with languages, Gender Issues, Literary References & Allusions, London, Unreliable memory, a friend suggested this be tagged Orlando/London, conflict resolution via sitting around imagining things, memory makes an oddly unsatisfying revenge, subtle slut shaming
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-12-20
Updated: 2012-12-20
Packaged: 2017-11-21 18:27:40
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,453
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/600807
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/breathedout/pseuds/breathedout
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>If not for what happened next, mind, it could have been any Twelfth Night in any year of the past two hundred: Lady Orlando in hunting furs on Greenwich Park Hill, looking down on the city of London.</p>
            </blockquote>





	La chasse à la renarde (The Fox-Hunt)

**Author's Note:**

  * For [Violsva](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Violsva/gifts).



> Huge thanks to [Frytha](http://frytha.tumblr.com) for beta and Woolf-picking, and to [Cranberryloops](http://cranberryloops.tumblr.com) for helping me out with my extremely shaky memories of second-year Russian class. Further notes and translations at the end.
> 
> Violsva, I'm not sure how much world-building I've got here, as (true to Woolf's oeuvre) nothing exactly "happens." But hopefully the gender play and the prose will make up for it. Merry Yule, anyway!

If not for what happened next, mind, it could have been any Twelfth Night in any year of the past two hundred: Lady Orlando in hunting furs on Greenwich Park Hill, looking down on the city of London.

It was a recent habit, relatively speaking. Three centuries ago, or five, she’d not have come. She hadn’t needed it, in the roaming days of her boyhood and eager adolescence, when he’d scurried in his knee breeches amongst the Globe groundlings, turning to join in their jeering at the hunchbacked king. _To take her in her heart’s extremest hate_ , old Nick Green had said, grotesque and riveting, and young Master Orlando had jeered; had shouted; had chucked at the stage the rotten lettuces from the pig’s slop. During the long third act, when the time between murders dragged on, he had slipped out the theatre door under the outstretched arm of a Norseman. He’d haunted the alleys. He had warmed himself at the mullioned-gold windows of pubs, and hauled up the stinking water from the public wells, declaiming into them _O Lord_ , with echoing voice, _methought what pain it was to drown_.

As a boy, after all, he had been free; and as a man he had been freer. And he hadn’t drowned, after all, nor sickened; nor succumbed in battle; nor grown old. But in the rough swerve of the seventeenth into the eighteenth century, he had returned from Constantinople—a woman.

And trapped indoors by contracts and chaperones and corsetry (for indeed, it was no easy business surviving a coup, a fire, and one’s unlooked-for maidenhood all at one fell blow) the Lady Orlando had come simply to _crave_ the open air.

Which was all well and good in May, and heat-dry August. Summer was for taking in hand her hounds and her foolscap, and ambling out alone to the old oak tree; for throwing herself at its roots and breathing and breathing in. But the sodden chill of January was held insalubrious for the delicate constitution of a young, or indeed quite an old, lady; she was penned up indoors for weeks and months at a stretch, and she had felt, one night in late December of the year 1715 (or perhaps it was 1718, or 1713, or even 1710: the biographer cannot, alas! pinpoint so exactly the subtle turnings and tremblings of the heart), that one more breath taken in a stifling drawing room and she really must go mad.

And so she had wrapped herself in her father’s ancient furs. And, got up like a bear, like a Muscovite, she had come out to this place, through the old deer park to the high ground above the green where they ran the horses. She had looked out, through the burning-cold night air on the eve of a new year. She had followed with her eyes the serpentine Thames; had skipped across the river and through the docks of Limehouse; had traveled along the snake of water through Whitechapel and the old, dear City, and all the way to the distant new-minted dome of St. Paul’s.

She had remarked, that night in 1715 (or 1718, or 1713, or perhaps 1710), gazing down over the slopes of tree-trunks giving onto silvered rooftops (for it was a clement winter, that year, and no snow had yet fallen)—she had remarked, we say, on the vast distance her city had come, since her carefree boyhood. And she had felt immeasurably old.

For it had been as if, gazing down at the London of 1715 (or perhaps 1713, or even 1718), she had seen the city inscribed on the thinnest of onion-skins, one layered on top of the next. She had seen the opened-up avenues of the present day, certainly, gutted by the Great Fire and dotted here and there with Wren’s gleaming new domes. But she saw too, and simultaneously, all the former Londons she had known; so that she could look at the docks of Limehouse and observe, not only the rough bustle of trade; not only the Dutch sailing-ships at anchor in the harbour, and the bustle of tea and silk merchants over the causeways; but also the desolate marsh which that land had been upon her first trip to London as a boy, when he had leaned out of his father’s carriage and looked across the salt flats to glimpse the walls of the City in the far distance.

And then, looking further along toward the new Cathedral, she could see the wide avenues left cleared after the Fire, to let in the light and the clean air; but she could see too, as if traced upon a piece of thinnest vellum, and layered just before the city of the present day, the choked medieval alleys of memory. She could see the serving-maids still, in their brown stuff skirts and their stomachers; and the ancient apple-cart in Seething Lane that had sold the choicest fruit that autumn before the Great Freeze, when Orlando had skated the wide frozen fields with his Russian fox, his traitorous smiling Sasha, all the way back in the time of old Queen Bess.

Then the Lady Orlando had realised, gazing down at her beloved city, on the eve of 1716 (or 1714, or even 1711) that almost no one remained, anymore, who could see these Londons along with her. And the distance she had travelled seemed immense.

But now, by all accounts two centuries later—for the Great War was over, now, and the world trembled on the brink of the twentieth century’s third decade—she was no longer struck, very much, by the passage of time.

There they were, after all: the City walls. And they cupped the stone of the heart of London the same as they had when young Master Orlando had hunted deer in this park on Queen Bess’s patience. There, too, were the avenues: the Strand, and Holborn, and Fleet Street, the old mossy arteries of commerce, which still flowed with the city’s lifeblood, after all these years. And if they were brighter now; if faint flickering lanterns had been replaced with dim gas lamps, and if those in turn had given way to electric light illuminating the night equal to the day; it only meant that Orlando, looking down from her vantage point by the Observatory, could trace their well-worn shapes with greater ease.

In the intervening years, as well, the City itself had risen up to meet her. No longer did she stand alone in her furs on an isolated hilltop. Even at a distance from the Observatory, and from the site of the old Palace, other people were all around her. There were benches here now, and public paths. Girls walked arm-in-arm with their beaux; their flimsy shoes crunched on the gravel. Illicit laughter erupted in bursts from stands of beeches, where Oxbridge lads down for their holidays declaimed tipsily in Greek. Elderly couples murmured to one another; leant upon one another as they shuffled along.

Orlando drifted away from the throng. In an isolated corner of the park, away from the most brilliant shows of lights, it was dark still, and quiet. She walked there with her dogs, breathing in the air and the shifting of the years.

She almost missed the bench. It was so dark here, so muffled. It took stumbling, bumping her furred shin on the wood of the bench so that Clio yelped and Calliope growled, and the bench’s occupant startled and looked round, before Orlando realised that she wasn’t alone.

‘Oh,’ she said. ‘Down, Clio! I _do_ apologise,’ just as the huddled lump bestirred itself to speech.

‘ _Ostorozhno_!’ it hissed. Or something like it, anyway. Orlando had to pause and apologise all over, having missed the import of the figure’s words along with the fact of its very existence.

It was, in any case, quite an ancient personage, Orlando thought, watching it rearrange itself. She could make out its shape a bit now, turned as she was away from the light. It was wrapped in furs even larger and more mouldering than her own; and the creature’s face, deeply shadowed as it was, appeared scored, and cavernous, and gutted with years. It ( _she_ , surely? though Orlando couldn’t be positive) moved her jaw as if chewing on her own tongue, and the hollow skin of her cheeks shifted with it.

Orlando stood and stared, absently rubbing Calliope’s head just behind her straining, stood-up ears. The crone’s eyes caught the lights of the city, and reflected back a bright and eerie glare.

‘I apologise,’ Orlando said again, a little louder. She supposed such an aged specimen might be hard of hearing. ‘Are you recently arrived, then? Have you come as a fugitive?’

For there had been no mistaking, in the rasping hissing voice, the cadence of Muscovy. As a young and broken man, Orlando had turned about and walked the other way, whenever he’d heard such a voice issuing out of a pub or an alley or, most particularly, a ship. He had muttered to himself ‘harlot,’ and ‘treachery’; he had kept his mind carefully, painfully blank. As a woman, in these last two years since the Revolution, she had often thought it lucky that she’d left such games behind: there were sections of London, now, where one could hardly escape the accent.

The old woman didn’t answer right away. Clio whined, tentative in the darkness. It occurred to Orlando that the woman might not understand English, and thought back: far back, ages past. ‘ _Vvv_ ,’ she tried. ‘ _V Moskvá_?’

A hint of a smile at the corner of the old woman’s mouth. Those bright, bright, glittering eyes.

‘ _Il faut faire attention_ ,’ the woman croaked at last, smiling wider. ‘ _quand on se promène dans la nuit, Madame Orlande_.’

And Orlando—

Orlando—

Orlando stumbled, and reached out. It was only that her legs were sandwiched between the dogs’ solid panting flanks, and that her arm was caught quick by Sasha’s hand, that kept her from tumbling to the frozen ground.

And then there she was. The Lady Orlando, seated on a bench above the City with the Princess Marousha Stanilovska Dagmar Natasha Iliana Romanovitch, whom he had lost, as a young man, to a strapping Russian sailor, and had despaired of ever glimpsing again.

Yet, what does one do with the dreams of centuries past? Once upon a time we hoarded them in our hands, like precious golden specie; we cradled them, white-knuckled with jealousy. And then, one day, we opened our fists. We traded them away for the dusty miscellany that has made us what we are; and we did so in the expectation that this tender, once given, was gone from us forever. Or at least, so had Master Orlando done, on board ship to Constantinople.

And so it was with no small surprise, that January night, that she found herself face-to-face with the faithless Sasha, longed for and relinquished centuries past.

Orlando buried her fingers in the folds of skin at Clio’s neck. _Warm_ , she thought. _Living_ , she thought. She thought, _Sasha_ , and realised she had been silent too long. She was seized with the sudden conviction that it was hardly gentlemanly.

‘ _Donc_ ,’ she said, the French slow and rusty on her palate, ‘ _est-ce que tu fuis la revolution_?’

‘I was only teasing you,’ the old woman croaked, the skin crinkling in folds at the corners of her eyes. ‘I tutored Yekaterina Velikaya in English. Let us speak it, by all means. It will remind me of happier times.’

Sasha left off to hack into a handkerchief. The breath rasped in her lungs, wet and jagged. Orlando bit her lip to hear it.

‘I never thought,’ Orlando said. ‘ _Je n’ai jamais pensé de te revoir_ ; so much, so much has changed.’

Sasha nodded a little, absently, as if to herself. It was half a nod, and half a tremor; and Orlando felt, suddenly, the weight of years. Sasha was fairly primordial with them. And Orlando had always felt, in her presence, painfully, unbearably young.

‘You were always,’ Sasha said, as if swimming vaguely through Orlando’s thoughts. But then she said: ‘You were always such a sweet girl.’

‘I,’ Orlando breathed, not knowing what to say. Clio sat; laid her head on her mistress’s knee. ‘When you knew me, I was not—. I believe you are misremembering.’

Sasha looked askance at her. The faint radiant light of the city caught her in half-profile. Orlando could pick out, for a moment, the vellum-sketched ghost of the Muscovite girl she’d been.

‘You were not a full-grown woman,’ Sasha said, voice arch, eyebrow raised. ‘Hips like a boy’s. Tender buds of breasts. Remember how we skated out, over the ice?’

‘Yes,’ said Orlando, feeling Clio’s wet breath on her fingers, through her glove. ‘I remember. However, I—,’

‘You could never catch me up,’ said the old lady, fondly. ‘Well, it was not your fault! Not a boy in Moscow could match my speed, in those days, let alone a chit of an English girl. Skating on the ice, it was like—,’ she sighed. Her lungs rattled. ‘It was like flying.’

Orlando shifted on her seat. That winter, she thought. The Freeze; the Russian delegation; the broken-off engagement with Lady Margaret. Irish Margaret, who couldn’t skate at all. Orlando himself had barely been able to; not at the season’s beginning.

‘Ahh,’ Sasha sighed. ‘You complained of the short days, you remember? But even in December, to me they seemed long. The furs, we would skate as far as you could manage, and then we would spread the furs out on the ice.’ She was as good as elbowing Orlando in the ribs: a gesture incongruously youthful, incongruously modern. ‘Spread them out and lie there together,’ she went on. ‘You remember?’

Orlando did indeed remember, which was much of the reason for her confusion; much of the reason that she was blinking so furiously, with her hand so hard in Clio’s fur; much of the reason that the ground seemed to be spinning beneath her. For she remembered the narrow space of minutes when their bodies had still been flushed through with the exertion of skating so far, so fast. She remembered trying to burrow with stiff fingers through the layers of Sasha’s heavy furs and woolens and and cobalt silks. She remembered Sasha laughing as Orlando fumbled at the ties of his own breeches, and she remembered the pressure of Sasha’s blood-warm hand teasing him, pressing his eager aching cock against his stomach through the layers of wool and leather. She remembered their breaths fogging together the frigid air, and Sasha laughing into his neck, and she remembered the sweet, warm heat of sinking into Sasha’s clutching body.

‘I remember,’ Orlando said.

But the Princess Romanovitch took her hesitation wrongly.

‘Ah, you don’t want to admit it now,’ she said, bitter in her tone. ‘Not ancient and ugly as I am now—,’ and it was only Orlando’s horror at the misunderstanding that made her rush into the breach.

‘No!’ she cried. ‘Oh no, that’s—I remember so clearly, I assure you; it’s only that I was—at the time—I.’ She stuttered, and stopped. Calliope nosed at her boot; she took a breath. ‘I was a—you must remember, I was a—a boy.’

The word was unwieldy on her tongue, blunt. Strange. She had been questioned and quarantined, examined within an inch of her life by attorneys and medical men, by whom she’d been burdened with proving her sex. But this was _Sasha_. Of all people.

‘Remember the state suppers?’ Sasha said.

‘I—,’ said Orlando, even more wrong-footed at the change of tack. ‘I—yes, I suppose. The, the roast suckling pigs and the peacocks and you. You asked me to pass the salt.’

‘And how you flushed, when I asked it!’ Sasha said, reminiscent. ‘ _Et que ton français était beau_! You were, of course, the only woman in the court I could speak to; I had to have you. They would hardly have let me roam the ice fields unchaperoned, and me, a young unmarried thing among the burly shipmen.’

‘Times,’ said Orlando, feeling she was having an entirely different conversation to the one being held by the old woman across from her on the bench. ‘Times change. Rules and. Expectations.’

‘Yes,’ Sasha said, and was silent. Orlando licked her lips, but then Sasha said, ‘Some things, yes. But an English girl so young as you were. There is something eternal about such a thing.’

‘An English _boy_ so young,’ Orlando said, a strange panic in her voice so that Clio snuffled at her hand. ‘And so foolish with love and poetry that he called you after his pet.’

‘Clever girl,’ said Sasha. ‘I _was_ a fox. _And while the dog lay panting in the sedge, I up and snapt and bolted through the hedge_. Though of course, it had not yet been written.’

It had been too long, Orlando found, for any tensing of the chest, or beating of the heart at those words. But still she saw the scene: herself a reedy boy, heart breaking on the breaking ice, watching his black-haired laughing Sasha bolting away from him to the hulking great ship; watching her being embraced, and spirited down, down into the ship’s hold.

‘A silly boy, you mean,’ said Orlando, sighing. ‘A silly English boy to serve as distraction, until the ice thawed.’

Sasha, weathered like an old folio binding, did not deny or confirm. She sat gazing out at the city. Wheezing slightly. Calliope, head on her paws, gave a great troubled groan.

Orlando closed her eyes. Remembered them together. Felt the weight of years, and for the first time in three centuries let herself imagine what had happened next. How the ship had sailed out, among the treacherous ice floes, out and out to sea, beyond the horizon of Orlando’s vision. How Sasha and her sailor lover had traveled on; how for months they had billed and cooed, argued and reconciled, all amongst the grey-blue waters, far out of sight of land. How they must have fetched up in old Goa, and walked hand-in-hand in the washed-bright markets to the soft ems of Portuguese as the fishermen dragged in their nets and the whitewashed churches rose around them. How they would have smiled, Sasha and her sailor, wading ashore in the Moluccas, brown with the island sun as the wind blew their hair back off their shoulders and wrapped their bodies about in the overpowering perfume of nutmeg. How off the Cape they must have screamed each other down; and how Sasha broke away in Amsterdam, or the narrow arching alleys of Genoa, and fled north, not east as her sailor expected but west, over the Alps and down, through Lyon, and Dijon, skirting the edges of Paris, bartering in her lovely old-fashioned court French for rough cider and steaks of fine Norman beef, before she stowed away in her rags on the cross-Channel ferry, and washed ashore at the white cliffs of Dover. How she learned in London, from the mouths of English schoolgirls, the tongue she’d scorned to share with Orlando. (How, perhaps, Sasha had thought of Orlando then; how in her memory those schoolgirls’ mouths had mixed themselves with his even as he had kissed a Coptic girl on the bank of the Bosphorus.) How years had passed; years of kisses and accounts; and how when she’d returned home it was to a different Russia, to a new capitol city waiting shining in Neva Bay, and a new Empress to rule it. How the fortunes of a language tutor waxed and waned with the Western romance of the Tsars. How her several tongues had shaped themselves to novels, then to tracts and manifestos; how Sasha had held herself, reading over them in drawing rooms, and in train cars, and crossing the border in 1917 with only the clothes on her back. Orlando imagined it all, her eyes closed on a bench on Greenwich Park Hill. And did it matter so much, she thought, at this late hour, how she had remembered Orlando along the way? Did it matter how Orlando, in his bitter tight-rigged ships, had seen fit to remember her?

‘One must live,’ Sasha said at last, huddling into her furs. ‘One must live, to chase the hounds another day.’

It was not a sentiment with which Orlando could bring herself to argue. She made a quiet noise in her throat. They sat, watching the lights of the city below.

‘We were children,’ Sasha said. ‘Children, playing on the ice.’

‘Yes,’ said Orlando. ‘Yes, we were.’

**Author's Note:**

>   1. The standard French term for the fox hunt is “la chasse au renard,” so the title here is the same phrase but with the gender of the fox specified as female. “Renarde,” when applied to human females, is translated as “bitch” or (fittingly) “vixen.”
>   2. The play Orlando remembers seeing at the old Globe Theatre is Shakespeare’s Richard III; the first quoted line is from Richard’s fantastic speech on winning the hand of Lady Anne; the second is from Clarence’s prophetic dream speech.
>   3. Orlando has named her dogs after Greek Muses: Clio was the Muse of History, and Calliope the Muse of Epic Poetry.
>   4. Translations from the Russian and French:  
> 
>     * _Ostorozhno_ : Careful!
>     * _V…v Moskva?_ : Orlando is trying to ask “From Moscow?” but mucking up the declensions a bit.
>     * _Il faut faire attention…quand on se promène dans la nuit, Madame Orlande._ : One must pay attention when one is out walking at night, Madame Orlando.
>     * _Donc…est-ce que tu fuis la revolution_ : Are you fleeing the Revolution, then?
>     * _Je n’ai jamais pensé de te revoir_ : I never expected to see you again.
>     * _Et que ton français était beau!_ : And how beautiful your French was!
>   5. Yekaterina Velikaya: The implication is that Sasha was on intimate terms with Catherine the Great. 
>   6. The lines Sasha quotes (slightly altered) are from the John Clare poem “The Fox,” about a fox who plays dead to trick his pursuers, and uses the trick to escape them and survive another day. Clare was an English Romantic poet working around the time of Orlando’s transformation.
> 



End file.
